I felt similar last year. I was trying to do them in Zig and Rust, and it felt like most of the challenge was just writing custom data parsers for poorly formatted data which felt too much like my day job.
Agree.
I think it helps to do it in a language you're not familiar with, or with some artificial limitation on how to solve it (no third party libraries for instance).
It takes more time, but felt less like a grind for me.
There were only like two or three days that felt frustrating, but mostly because of the problem being poorly specified.